Wendy Bishop--"Helping Peer Writing Groups Succeed"

The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing. Cheryl Glenn and Melissa A. Goldthwaite. Eds. Bedford/St. Martin's: New York, NY. 2014

"Has group work been overrated? Have teachers been deceived? Or, have teachers become confused by the apparent simplicity of a rather complex teaching method? I would like to explore these questions by reviewing research that discusses the use of peer writing groups, by profiling successful and unsuccessful peer writing groups and, finally, by offering a plan for preparing and training students for the method. Such a plan must also include guidelines for evaluating the effectiveness of peer writing groups in the composition classroom."

Research on Peer Writing Groups

Workshops have been oversimplified.

Basing her argument on research revealing the success of peer writing groups, Bishop argues that the problem with peer writing groups doesn't lie with the model itself. Rather, ill-prepared teachers and poor teacher awareness lead to flaws in peer writing groups.

She also responds to criticisms that "students are not always sure of their group role, aren't able to stand back form their own writing, don't know what they want to know, and have reluctance to offer critical comments." Bishop responds by saying these problems "can be somewhat alleviated by student and teacher preparation for the method...Clearly, there is a need to introduce writing students to the vocabulary and terminology of the composition community."

Profiles of Peer Writing Groups

Bishop recommends rating writing groups using a continuum that ranges from "fully developed" to "under developed" to "broken down." The profiles are "only useful in that they give a teacher a way to begin to sort out group interaction patterns...By profiling her own writing groups, a teacher can learn how writing peer groups can become useless and sometimes lifeless."

Bishop then provides different profiles and characteristics for failing and successful groups: (below list copied from text)

Ways Peer Writing Groups Fail:

• Too much or too little leadership.
• Poor attendance or participation or preparation of some students leading to resentment between members.
• Unclear group goals; group doesn't value work or works too quickly.
• Group doesn't feel confident of group members' expertise or members are afraid to offer criticism.
• Group doesn't understand new role of instructor.
• Group never develops adequate vocabulary for discussing writing.
• Group fails to record suggestions or to make changes based on members' suggestions.

Ways Peer Writing Groups Succeed:

• Group successfully involves all members.
• Group works to clarify goals and assignments. 
• Group develops a common vocabulary for discussing assignments. 
• Group learns to identify major writing problems such as organization, tone, and focus, as well as minor writing problems such as spelling errors, and so on. 
• Group learns to value group work and to see instructor as a resource which the group can call on freely. 

 "Most writers are in agreement, students and teachers need preparation and training for successful peer group work.

Preparing for Peer Writing Groups

To better conduct peer writing groups, teachers should read widely about collaborative learning and then expose students to the theory as well via "handouts, class discussion, and continual monitoring of group work."

Bishop then enumerates the various ways teachers can group students:

• pairs that merge into larger groups
• by interest
• gender and age
• based on writing proficiency 

Bishop lets students stay in the same group for around 5 meetings but never the entire semester.

She also recommends students work out inner-group conflicts on their own and develop a group name to help establish a sense of community. Group members should each have a role: monitor, historian, etc.

Training Peer Writing Groups

Teachers should train the groups in two areas: group roles and writing response. Handouts detailing group roles can assist in speeding up the training. Historians should know what their job as secretary entails. Monitors should knows that they must keep an eye on time, etc.

More important is the teacher's responsibility to teach the class how to talk about writing. "In this effort, the teacher functions as the conduit linking the class to academic community. She may begin by teaching the class necessary terminology (concerning writing process and writing analysis) and by training writers and readers to work together through role playing, reviewing sample essays, and so on.

Monitoring Peer Writing Groups

Teachers don't look busy during this time, but they are. They must visit with groups, listen, interject (at times), facilitates, lead, and know when to pull the class back together as a whole.

Evaluating Peer Writing Groups

Teachers can have students keep a group work folder as a form of evaluation and accountability.
"Measurements of student growth in collaborative learning techniques and writing in general can be accomplished with pre and post testing in the following areas:

1. pre and post written descriptions of what students feel can be accomplished in writing groups
2. pre and post written descriptions of students' writing process
3. pre and post writing apprehension tests
4. pre and post essay samples 

A

Maggie Debelius--What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Workshops

Teaching with Student Texts. Joseph Harris, John Miles and Charles Paine, Eds. Logan: Utah State UP; 2010.

Debelius writes as a response to recent publications calling the value of workshops into question.

The Workshop and Its Discontents
We like to workshop in class because it emulates the values we want to imbue: audience, revision, writing process.

Critics of workshops compare the workshopping process to sadism and the blind leading the blind. Students don't know how to give feedback. In addition, many say that workshops promote conformity.

Debelius then responds to these criticisms, describing how she uses workshops in her classroom. Her workshops:

• focus on one piece of writing
• generates feedback
• spend the first month learning how to effectively workshop
• teach students "the moves that matter in writing workshops."
• always occur on a Friday
• writer initiated--the writer asks the readers for specific kinds of feedback

Week One

• Debelius meets with each student one-on-one in the first week to teach them where her office is and learn what matters to the student.
• She also discusses a one-paragraph piece of writing with the student.

Week Two: The Listening Workshop

•  The purpose is to "encourage students to take risks...[and] help students confront anxiety about sharing their work.
• Students bring in a personal essay and students respond by listening, smiling, nodding, and asking for clarification. No intense criticism is allowed. 
• Students then write a reflection about how it felt sharing their work.

Week Three: Modeling Effective Response

• This workshop builds off of an assigned summary.
• The students often have a difficult time going from the listening workshop to the summary workshop.
• The students might have "an inadequate understanding of the argument they're summarizing, a misunderstanding of the assignment itself, or reluctance to criticize a peer."
• Her solution is to schedule the workshop in the writing center.

Week Four: The Research Workshop

• To combat the assumption that workshops are normative and quash creativity and tend not to focus on developing ideas, Debelius conducts a research workshop.
• The students bring in a list of sources used by an author. 
• The students then gather in small groups and work on computers to evaluate the sources.
• The students were able to delve into the memberships of cited sources and uncovered some faulty data.
• The goal is to join the research and writing processes, and because the format is a short list, students are more likely to pose ideas and discuss rather than clam up because they don't want to comment on someone's writing. 
• "This gives us a chance to talk meaningfully about the difference between scholarly and popular sources and to consider how the use and presentation of their source material builds credibility."

Week Five: The Expert Workshop (Or Acquiring A New Perspective)

• This week focuses on rebutting the premise that workshops don't "cast issues in a fresh light"--Mark Edmundson. 
• Debelius has her students write drafts on essays that assert college students are coddled and pampered. Her students share their responses via an online discussion board/learning platform. The students then visit a professional in the subject matter of their drafts, which "gives students the confidence, vocabulary, and evidence to take on an expert." Essentially, the students are able to use their drafts as a platform for engaging in a higher-level discussion with an expert on an issue, which then could lead to fresh ideas instead of a restating of what is already known.  

Workshops continue throughout the semester, but since Debelius has guided her students in the first five weeks in proper workshop practices, she believes the workshops can better avoid the pitfalls of non-productive workshops.

"The final element is to allow adequate time for students to reflect on which assignments and workshops they find most and least successful...By varying and asking students to reflect on the workshop form, effective peer response becomes a course outcome rather than just a pedagogical tool in the service of writing."
A 

Joseph Harris--"Workshop and Seminar"

Teaching with Student Texts, Harris, Miles, and Paine (Eds) Logan,; Utah State UP, 2010.

Harris opens his chapter with an anecdote about a successful small-group workshop he held at a coffee shop. He retells the procedures of the workshop and how it led a specific student to revise her paper. He then moves to issues of logistics, noting that workshops, since they work best in small groups with a teacher as a facilitator/moderator, could distract from the whole class identity and purpose.

He reviews the posed solutions of others with respectful disdain, and begins to explore how we as teachers "can talk about student texts in class in ways that are of direct use to everyone in the room."

In trying to maintain beneficial writing workshops and whole-class productivity, Harris turns to a writing seminar model.

• "In a seminar, a teacher leads a conversation about a text written by one of the students in the room. But the point of this talk is less to offer the writer advice for revision than to frame a lesson on writing for everyone in the class...The questions that drives a seminar is "What can we learn as writers from this text?" 

 Harris' seminars take one of two different forms.

Multitext Seminar
In this form of the writing seminar, Harris selects a few student texts that struggle with the same issue or falter when trying to make the same moves. He then uses these as a platform for classroom discussion. The selections also exhibit "a problem in writing that many or most of the students in the class are confronting right then." These excerpts offer multiple solutions from a range of responses.

He then asks students to take out their drafts and make some notes about how they could revise their responses to incorporate the moves they discussed during the seminar. Harris writes that such classes "direct students back to their own work in progress." His seminars pose questions about "how to make particular pieces stronger, they are questions that anyone trying to write intellectual prose needs to think about--and thus that a group of writers can talk about usefully together."

Single-Text Seminar
Focuses on a single, teacher-selected text that raises "an issue in writing that everyone in the room can apply to their own work in progress."

"The job of the teacher in a single-text seminar is to identify moments in an essay that can lead to more thinking and writing."

The seminar allowed Harris to "point to the need for them all not merely to correct their prose but to develop their ideas."

Both/And
Harris argues that composition classrooms can benefit greatly from utilizing both the workshop and seminar formats. He believes "that good seminars help set up good workshops."

"The workshop and seminar do different things. As writing teachers, we need to do both. The focus of a workshop is on the individual writer...The seminar, though, is more of a metaspace. Its aim is to help the readers of a text understand something new about the craft of writing."

Harris notes that many teachers resist workshop formats because the "field tends to link teaching formats to intellectual and ideological positions." Essentially, workshops are seen as intellectually inferior forms of instruction.

Questions:
How would Harris' format work outside of Duke? His examples of student comments and participation seem borderline unrealistic for less prestigious institutions. Then again, the method could be adopted with less dense texts as a basis for classroom discussion.

Should we use student-generated texts as whole class examples?
A